No Job Is "Beneath" You

That's actually a toxic way of thinking.

I used to have a LinkedIn friend (we never met in real life) who did pretty well in recruiting SaaS (think of hiring platforms) and had a decent “exit” (read: he made money), but he struggled figuring out his next steps (even with money) and, a few years later, he was a checkout person at Trader Joe’s. When he came back to LinkedIn and posted about it, invariably half the reactions were aghast — “You were in the biggest boardrooms of HR Tech, and now you’re ringing a bell at Trader Joe’s??!?!” — and some were more empathetic. The dude had two young kids at the time. Personally, I get it. I realize some people immediately think “Oh, driving DoorDash is beneath me,” and honestly, I felt that at times in my own life. But in reality, nothing is beneath you, assuming it remains some general moral framework.

I think broadly the problem is that we have an “overpopulation of elites,” which is a trite thing to say but also, some trite things are true. People emerge from decent-sounding four-year schools and they have debt, and their parents want them generally “off the payroll,” and they also want to experience their 20s in a cool city, so now they suddenly have to figure out how to “make it work” in Los Angeles vs., say, Topeka. (In reality, I better jobs are better in Kansas. Aren’t the Koch brothers based there? They must pay halfway decent.)

There’s other stuff going on, of course, including:

1. We might be in, or approaching, a recession.

2. Employers alternatively believe that “no one wants to work anymore” but are also pissed about employees having multiple jobs behind their back.

3. We’re in a long-running period of wage stagnation that most “LinkedIn Lunatics” try to find some obscure chart about salaries in Cupertino since 2000 to avoid discussing.

4. Any number starting with “1” is higher than “0.”

I understand the power of being attached to a specific brand as “who” you are (wrong way to frame it) or “what” you do (better way). I was a diehard sports fan for most of my youth; I grew up in New York City, and could tell you the entire starting pitching rotation of the Cleveland Indians in 1993, in all likelihood. At 24, I got a job at ESPN. Absolute fucking dream job for me. Now, I grew to hate that job over time, which happens with dream jobs — but for the eight or so years I was there, it was important to me to be on guys trips or at weddings or in bar conversations and tell people I worked there. It felt good. And jobs are definitely part of a narrative script we create about our lives and our worth. So is parenting, so is neighborhood, so are vacations, etc. It’s all a nice little tapestry.

But when markets seem chaotic and we may be utterly reinventing the world order at the same time as many companies are starting to embrace automation,